Nicolas Aznárez
A few years ago I traveled along Russia's almost endless border, through fourteen countries, from North Korea to Norway, to find out what it means to have the largest country in the world as a neighbor.
Thirty years after the failed coup in August 1991 - the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union's existence - the Kremlin continues to cast shadows over the former Soviet republics.
Georgia
Large blue signs announced in Russian, Georgian, and even English that we were along the South Ossetian border.
A wide barbed wire fence clearly marked the delimitation of the border between Georgia and that independent republic.
An elderly man, dressed in plain dirty work clothes, approached the fence.
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"You have ten minutes maximum," reported one of the Georgian soldiers who had escorted me to the border.
The Russians are watching us.
They will be here in a very short time.
The man introduced himself as Dato Vanishvili, and immediately began to tell his story:
"I woke up one morning, five years ago now, and the fence was here!"
Originally the border was about a hundred meters higher, but a few years ago it was moved and now my home is in South Ossetia!
South Ossetia is one of the four separatist republics that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
After the war between Georgia and Russia in 2008, Moscow has exercised absolute control over this republic and it is no longer possible to enter the country from the Georgian side, despite the fact that the Ossetian territory belongs de jure to Georgia.
The war ended long ago, but the tug of war continues without noise, under the cover of night.
Every year the border fence moves, here and there, a few hundred meters into Georgia, with the Georgian authorities as helpless witnesses.
And as always, ordinary citizens are the ones sacrificed on the altar of geopolitics.
-What I can do?
Dato Vanishvili wondered desperately on the other side of the fence.
My wife is ill, so we cannot move, and she does not receive assistance here.
This is not life.
Maybe suicide is the solution?
Kazakhstan
Like many other towns in Kazakhstan, Poperechnoye was almost abandoned.
Only a few older women and a handful of inveterate young men stood their ground.
One of them, Borís, a tall man with broad shoulders like a bear, invited us to have tea:
"My mother isn't home, so I'm sorry, but I don't have much else to offer you," she said, waving her huge hands apologetically.
"How many kilometers are we from the Russian border?"
-I asked for.
"Twenty miles away," he answered without hesitation.
In fact, until just before the revolution this territory was part of Russia, ”he continued enthusiastically.
There were no Kazakhs here before the Russians arrived, historically this territory is not Kazakh at all.
However, we have to learn Kazakh in school, and if we want to have a job in administration, we have to speak it fluently.
But why the hell do I have to learn Kazakh?
Only Russians live here!
During the “wilderness” campaign sponsored by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, so many Russians moved to Kazakhstan to cultivate land that the Kazakhs became a minority in their own country. However, it turned out that the saline and dry lands of the steppes were difficult to cultivate, and today the Kazakhs are once again in the majority and the ethnically Russians make up less than 20 percent of the population. To highlight the shift in the ethnic balance, and as a clear indication of the direction modern Kazakhstan wishes to take, the authorities have decided that in 2025 the Kazakh language will no longer be written with the Cyrillic alphabet but with the Latin one.
On the other hand, with geography, governments can do nothing.
No other country has such a long border with Russia.
Out of doors, the Kazakh government pretends that the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine have not changed its relationship with Moscow one iota, but quietly, over the past few years, they have quietly offered incentives to ethnically Kazakh people to settle in the border areas with Russia.
Just in case.
Ukraine
On International Women's Day I was invited to the home of a Russian soldier, in Donetsk, the youngest separatist republic in the world:
"When I heard about what was happening in the Crimea, I went there to help out," he explained.
I go to the places where the Russians are threatened.
I am here as a volunteer, take note.
Nobody pays me.
"Is that why you went to eastern Ukraine, to help the threatened Russians?"
-asked.
"Let's see, tell me, what is" Ukraine "really?
Linar replied rhetorically, without waiting for an answer. "Exactly, there is no Ukraine!"
The people here are called Ukrainians, but they are actually Russian.
There are Russian dialects that are difficult to understand.
The Ukrainian is one of them.
The Dombas and Lugansk People's Republics declared independence from the rest of Ukraine on May 12, 2014, supported by Russian soldiers, volunteers or not.
At first, many believed that these territories would be integrated into Russia as happened with Crimea, which had been annexed that same year, but now it seems more plausible that Donetsk and Lugansk end up as Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia: two separatist republics, international pariahs , not recognized by anyone except by themselves reciprocally, and which have become a permanent headache for the Government of Kiev, something that has always been the objective of Russia.
So far, more than thirteen thousand people have lost their lives in the war in eastern Ukraine, and as the conflict enters its eighth year, a permanent solution appears to be still a long way off.
Anyone who has experienced what it means to have a neighbor of an intractable and stubborn nature will know that, at best, one can only hope for a kind of armed neutrality that finally allows for a reserved salute above the fence.
But real peace is only achieved when the neighbor leaves.
Countries cannot move from place to place and Russia much less than any other.
In the first years after the 1991 coup, there was a tendency in the West to underestimate the feeling of loss of power and prestige of the Russians, along with a stubborn imperialist ambition, deeply ingrained and old in Russian geopolitical thought.
After two decades with Vladimir Putin in power, relations between East and West have cooled considerably.
The Baltic region and the rest of the countries
"If the Russians come, I'll flee into the forest to fight." The girl stared at me.
The weapon is ready.
I am ready to sacrifice my life for the freedom of Latvia.
No one will help the Kazakhs if the Kremlin decides to take over a part of Kazakhstan, just as no one took a step to help the Georgians in the war against Russia in 2008, nor was anyone involved in the war in eastern Ukraine;
but the situation in the Baltic countries is different.
In the 1990s, these countries became members of the European Union, and NATO in the early 2000s. Therefore, a Russian attack on the Baltic states is highly unlikely.
However, people are afraid.
They live in the shadow of the big brother to the east and, at regular intervals, hear saber rattling in the form of extended military exercises on the other side of the border fence.
In addition, a large part of the population of Estonia and Lithuania is Russian, it is part of the
rysskij mir
, of the Russian world, which Putin has permission to defend.
Despite thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow has never ceased to regard the lost Soviet republics as Russia's backyard.
The worst positioned are the neighbors who do not have powerful friends or a great military alliance to cover their backs.
They are the majority of them and they are alone.
Erika Fatland
is a writer and anthropologist.
Translation by
Carmen Freixanet.